I teach at East Tennessee State University's Engineering department and our printing lab acquired 3 Raise3D N2s last year. I've been absolutely astonished by the overall quality they can put out. However, there is one artifact that I have not been able to tweak out of them for the life of me. I'm getting these weird pits of nearly identical length at seemingly random places throughout the print. They tend to occur less on prints with lots of curves and direction changes. However, prints with long flat faces have them everywhere; usually clustered in a few large areas with other areas practically flawless. I am fairly certain it is in my settings as all 3 printers we have resulted in the same artifact. Though they are in slightly different places even on reprints. I am getting the same artifacts whether I use Ideamaker, or simplify3d. Haven't tried cura on them yet.

At first, I thought it would be from the start/stop of each layer, but I set my slicer settings to line up the layer start/stop into a seam which can be seen in the rounded corner a little to the right of the center of the image. Most of the pits are to the left of that seam. To give you an idea, this part is about 3 inches long, printed at 0.1mm layer height and at 40mm/s. I have tried temperature ranges from 190 to 220C and noticed the minimal difference.

As far as Filament, I am getting these regardless of which brand I have tried. Thus far I have tried Raise3D, Hatchbox, Esun, Colorfabb, among other odd brands.

Any ideas on what this could be or what settings I could try?

Last edited by Aldenwind on Sat Jun 02, 2018 3:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Layer Starts Points are hardly to be totally avoided during printing even with high retraction settings. But you can adjust their positions. Normally Random will be not that obvious as the points are broken apart with each other by layers.